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I'm a programmer. It's been my profession for 21 years. And I know my brain is a little warped by it -- I can program bare metal, but have difficulty understanding my toaster oven. Still, I have to say that Macs have NEVER made a lick of sense to me. There's just all these control/clover-thingy key combinations -- who has time for that? The mouse only has one button, which means that the right-click, the most powerful tool in Windows, isn't available. And the closed architecture doesn't exactly help with understanding what's going on under the covers.

I have no love for Bill Gates or Microsoft, mind you. I think windows is weak and buggy. But at least it makes some sense, and the information you need to use it or program for it is freely and abundantly available on the internet.

The saddest thing to ever happen to personal computers was the death of OS/2. Powerful, stable, fully pre-emptive scheduling, and 100% object oriented. Unfortunately, IBM couldn't market salmon to grizzly bears.
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Joe Baker, who has two iMacs -- in boxes on a shelf in the garage .

Joe Baker wrote: I have no love for Bill Gates or Microsoft, mind you. I think windows is weak and buggy. But at least it makes some sense, and the information you need to use it or program for it is freely and abundantly available on the internet.

The saddest thing to ever happen to personal computers was the death of OS/2. Powerful, stable, fully pre-emptive scheduling, and 100% object oriented. Unfortunately, IBM couldn't market salmon to grizzly bears.

Give me a command line interface and I'm happy.

Joe, I don't know how far back your OS/2 background goes, but I've still got my OS/2 1.1 SDK and the huge box of manuals that came with it. Beautiful, detailed documentation--if they said it worked such-and-so way, it did just that. MS SDK and DDK documentation reminds me of something done by a college freshman as a term project. One of my OS/2 reference books still has an appendix detailing agreements between MS and IBM for plans for OS/3. I even paid the three grand for the pre-release development kit--and months later, was offered an NT SDK instead by MS when they pulled their fast one on IBM. I got a refund instead--the attempt at bait-and-switch really got to me.

I do use Linux from time to time, but whether or not you like it seems to depend on an act of religious faith and knowing just the right wording for the sacred rituals. My first Unix port was done from a Bell Labs 1/2" tape read on a PDP 11/70 (that accounting happened to own) and although I've lived in the Unix/Linux world on and off for over 25 years, I've always felt like a visitor.

OS?360 was usable, even if I never mastered the finer points of JCL. I really liked CDC SCOPE, though.

I used macs all through high school, because that was what we had available in our computer labs. When I purchased my own computer I went PC, because macs had really bugged the heck out of me. The one button mouse, crazy window arrangement (just couldnt get used to it), and a "built for idiots" feel really got to me. I-Macs have some of the worst designed keyboards ever.

The macs I used were always crashing and locking up on me. I would be in the middle of something and the computer would freeze, causing me to lose whatever it was I was working on. XP has been very good to me, and very stable, except I have tried to upgrade, and I think the hardware conflicts with my soundcard and motherboard are causing some difficulties..... Oh well, its almost time for me to get a AMD 64 processer anyway, which will mean a whole new computer.

I have worked with computers since about 1972, when I was using a teletype terminal to work with an HP 1000 timeshare machine and storing my Basic programs on paper tape. My first "PC" was a Tektronix in 1979 that had their own operating system. I used in in my first job as an engineer to perform statistical analysis on manufacturing quality control data.

I have been using DOS/Windows machines since about 1983. I also used MACs, when I ran a division of an advertising agency. Given the evolution of Windows I see absolutely no benefit to MACs any more. One GUI is pretty much like another, and the MACs I worked with crashed just as often as the Windows machines I have used.

About 10 years ago MACs had such a superior graphic processing capability that they were the only way to go for work requiring detailed graphics, unless one wanted to work with a UNIX machine, especially the Silicon Graphics stuff. Now, the differences are minor.

I do have a problem with the idea that GUIs are the best interface for everyone. I have found that for certain types of jobs, especially customer service reps, a text based interface can be more effective. GUIs were designed for the casual user, but if you are using the same capabilities every day, having to go back and forth between keyboard and mouse wastes time and effort. Function keys are much more efficient.

For programmers, I think the best interface would be mutliple text based windows. That way they wouldn't have to deal with the limitations of the graphical interface but can multi-task.

My daughter, who graduated from college with an Art degree, uses a MAC, but my son, who is a music recording major, is running Pro-Tools on his Windows based Laptop. I use an Athlon 64 Windows PC at home, and the Windows laptop that the company supplies at work. If they gave us MACs I would adjust, but it would never happen due to the cost.

I started with an Apple--but not a MAC. It was 1983 and our first home computer was an Apple-IIe. For $1995 you got 32K memory, a 1-mhz processor, and 1 - 5.25 floppy. The 12" green screen monitor was extra. When we needed to upgrade, there was just so much more software available for the PC that, we went with a PC. MAC's were expensive and not even in color yet.

Both our sons are engineers and they use PC's at home. The oldest - a mechanical engineer uses Sun-Micro work stations at work. My other Son, electrical/computer engineer works at IBM. Of course he uses PC's at work and at home.

I use a Mac. I opened up my iBook here at the hotel in Atlantic City, and as you can see by this post, I'm online using the hotel's wireless network. I didn't have to configure anything; I selected the network, and that was it.

My roommate has a Dell Inspiron laptop running XP, and it had some driver issue that he never had before. He can't get online.

Time that I spent "maintaining" my system over the past year: 0 hours. No kidding -- that's a "zero". I don't own anything from Norton, I don't have any antivirus or antispyware software. I never even knew what people were getting so upset about with popup windows until I saw them happening on a friend's Wintel PC -- they've never happened like that for me.

That's why I still use a Mac. I don't have to know anything to use it.

Also, if I wanted a multibutton mouse, I could get one and use it with no problems (even if it's a Microsoft mouse). They're all relatively cheap anyway.

Lew wrote:I have worked with computers since about 1972, when I was using a teletype terminal to work with an HP 1000 timeshare machine and storing my Basic programs on paper tape.

Any programmers here from the punched card batch-processing days? The 029/026 card punch was my best friend for years before the luxury of an interactive terminal came my way. Code your program on a coding form, punch the cards or turn them into the keypunch pool, who'd make a mess out of your scribbling, then do an 80-80 listing on the 407. Desk-check, correct, turn the job in for running and get the results back later in the day. No interactive debuggers, just core dumps. Repeat as needed.

Even with the changes in tools, I've sometimes thought that the number of debugged lines of code per man-hour hasn't changed all that much over the years.

Doing checkoutfrom your "desk top" before running always forced you to really get a solid understanding of what you were doing.

Teletypes were the devil's spawn. There was no easy way to edit paper tapes, but the chad was great for practical jokes.

I just missed the punch cards. I do remember using a TTY to make patches for a program which was then printed out on paper tape. After the Ops program was loaded (but not run) via mag tape, we would load the paper tape in the TTY reader and execute the patch. The "Ops" (or operational) program was what the Air Traffic Controllers used at radar facilities and control towers.

My first computer was an Atari ST with 1 meg of memory. I really liked that thing. It was great for recording music as well as a host of other tasks. I still think it was a great design... everything was external. You plugged in your floppy drives, modems, midi instruments, whatever. Unfortunately, by about 1989 there was no longer any support for them. I did see that there was an active "Atari Underground" well into the mid-1990s. Now, because of software availability I mostly use PC for daily use. I have a Mac that gets used exclusively for writing marching band drills and occasional recording or midi projects.

The ONLY reason I use a PC is because similar power in a MAC would have cost about 2.5 times as much at the time I purchased my desktop and my wife's laptop. There was no way we could justify the extra expenditure - the money just wasn't there. My very first computer was an Atari 800 that I upgraded to 48K of RAM. K not M. Yet, strangely enough, it did everything I needed it to for about 5 years and would run BASIC, LOGO, Assembler, and PASCAL. I wrote a primitave Word Processor for it, back when most people didn't even know what one was. I wrote utilities to draw B/W pictures with a joystick and then print them out on an Epson MX-80 9 pin dot matrix printer. I remember owning Will Harvey's Music Construction Set but never being able to get it to print on my printer. I even wrote my own language for it, a derivitave of LOGO. My school had a couple of Commodore PETs, and where I took Saturday classes had an Apple II (which I really wanted but my stepfather could not afford.)
Oh, and I love JCL (both VSE and MVS) - did it fulltime for a couple of years and would still do it if there was half a demand.

Chuck(G) wrote:Any programmers here from the punched card batch-processing days?

Don't forget running into someone, dropping the box, and having to re-order all those @#&%$ things when you piked 'em up...

windshieldbug wrote:

Chuck(G) wrote:Any programmers here from the punched card batch-processing days?

Don't forget running into someone, dropping the box, and having to re-order all those @#&%$ things when you piked 'em up...

My first step was usually to get 'em on tape. Failing that, you could always wire up the 519 to punch sequence numbers, then use the 084 to sort them if they got dropped.

My nightmare was a card getting stuck in the reader and chewed to little bits and pieces.

Permanent (cross-boot) disk files were a godsend.

The first FORTRAN compiler I used was a deck of cards--you read in pass 1, then your source program and the compiler punched some intermediate output. You then read in pass 2 and then the intermediate deck just punched and presto--an object deck was punched.

Chuck "Sense switch 1 up and go"(G)

Chuck(G) wrote: ...
Any programmers here from the punched card batch-processing days? The 029/026 card punch was my best friend for years before the luxury of an interactive terminal came my way. Code your program on a coding form, punch the cards or turn them into the keypunch pool, who'd make a mess out of your scribbling, then do an 80-80 listing on the 407. Desk-check, correct, turn the job in for running and get the results back later in the day. No interactive debuggers, just core dumps. Repeat as needed.

Even with the changes in tools, I've sometimes thought that the number of debugged lines of code per man-hour hasn't changed all that much over the years.

Doing checkoutfrom your "desk top" before running always forced you to really get a solid understanding of what you were doing.

Teletypes were the devil's spawn. There was no easy way to edit paper tapes, but the chad was great for practical jokes.

The paper tape preceeded my using cards. I used punched cards all through college, including writing my Master's thesis in Fortran and spending many hours in the computer center waiting for my cards and printouts. The opening of remote job entry sites across the campus was a great improvement.

Lines of code per hour hasn't changed that much, but what you can do per line of code has. Also, in many programming languages lines of code isn't really a meaningful measure. The effective lines of code per progammer hour is probably much higher than it was 20 or 30 years ago.

Oh, and chads from punched cards were much better than from paper tape. we did fill up one guy's dorm room with computer paper, and his dresser was filled with punch card chads.

At least calculators came out for my Freshman year of college. It took another year though before they had all the functions of my slide rule.

Lew wrote: Oh, and chads from punched cards were much better than from paper tape. we did fill up one guy's dorm room with computer paper, and his dresser was filled with punch card chads.

There we disagree--paper tape chad was so much smaller and lighter in weight that the punched card chad that once it got into something, it was nearly impossible to get all of it out. It was simply easier to accumulate a great bulk of card chad--you had to punch a lot of tape to get five pounds of chad.

My first real-world job involved being shown a room piled almost to the celing with bundles of printout, each having a pink problem report stapled to it. These were core dumps. My first-day instructions? Grab one and see if I could figure out what went wrong. These weren't simply CPU dumps, but dumps from clusters of 4 machines coupled with 4 M words of bulk core. Probably the largest real-time multi-processor setup at the time. The job seemed impossible at the time. Sometimes, it still seems impossible.

In college, calculators were desktop jobs and found in the statistics lab.

I'm still not sure about the productivity issue; design still takes more time than implementation. Coding, if done right, should be almost an afterthought.

I discovered computers at a time when card punch machines SHOULD have already been boxed off and sent to the museum (c. 1981), but our University was so overwhelmed by students wanting to study Computer Science that they were hanging onto anything that could possibly be used to write programs. Thus I spent my first year and a half using punch cards for everything. The routine was grueling:

• classes all day.
  Wait in line for a card punch (avg wait -- about an hour).
  Punch your cards.
  Relinquish the machine as you go put your cards in the hopper to be read.
  Wait 30 minutes for your cards to show up in the "read jobs" hopper.
  Put them in a box, then go sit on the floor in the hall and work on homework.
  Come back in an hour or so and get listing.
  See 'missing semicolon' error.
  Wait in line for a card punch....

To get three runs of your program could take six or seven hours.

The good thing was that you learned (as Chuck said) to desk-check carefully. When every run was going to take a couple of hours, you didn't want to waste it finding out you'd misspelled a variable name or failed to declare a constant. But the problem was that you had to have the whole thing in your head at once to a much greater degree. It was much more difficult to code modularly in that environment.

Modularity was also often sacrificed to optimize for speed or memory, and coupling tended to be far too close.

I spent some time slogging through core dumps, and learned a lot; mainly, I learned to appreciate symbolic debuggers!

And yeah, give me a command line and text-based screens over mice and GUIs, any day. I still resent it every time I have to take my hand off my keyboard and go to the mouse. Any of your other programmers ever use Brief? What an editor! It could do anything anybody ever THOUGHT about doing with text, with no need for a mouse. I'd take it over any SDK environment I know of, but as far as I know it's not available for Windows (another great thing about OS/2...).
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Joe Baker, who feels like an old geezer sitting around the checkerboard at the general store with all the other old coots.

Joe Baker wrote:I Any of your other programmers ever use Brief? What an editor! It could do anything anybody ever THOUGHT about doing with text, with no need for a mouse. .

I tried Brief some years ago, but had the problem with WYKIWYL (what you know is what you like). I use an editor that I wrote a long time ago for 8085 under CP/M 2.2; ported it in 1983 to PCDOS on the 8088; then in 1990 ported it again to the Win32 API. It has my coding conventions and keyboard shortcuts all programmed in.

I used a PC at home for many years (a Dell) and I currently have a Dell at work. The Dell I had was ALWAYS crashing. And we're just talking about word processing, spreadsheet, and internet use. The last straw was when the computer has a fatal system error and I had to go in through safe mode and extract everything off the hard drive to disk. Then after reinstalling windows (huh huh), the screen died. This was after upgrading the OS (always an ongoing process on PCs - folks, it's a crime to keep putting out garbage software and forcing users to buy to get bugs solved, but I digress) to the supposably uber-stabile Windows XP. I always tolerated Windows, that's about it.

Well that was it. I got this Apple iBook I'm using right now and will never go back. As Leland said, I can get onto any wireless network, and I can use older software. And I love it that they aren't totally forcing OSX on you. You can switch between OSX or OS9, your choice.

I still have to use a PC for work and there are certain programs I can only use on PC as they aren't written for Mac. The Mac is so simple to use - what the heck are ya'll talking about. Why use 2 buttons when you can get it done with 1? And the thing is just slick - the keyboad isn't clunky, the fan hardly ever kicks on and rattles the room like a PC does, and the graphic interface is much nicer. I think Apple is much too late in the game to try and save costs by switching to Intel. I think they should stay the course on manufacturing (right now they control all the code and the bugs get bit in the making) and hire a marketing and sales division. Why the heck aren't they selling their wares at multiple retail levels? It shouldn't have to involve going behind the dumpster behind the alley to get one (I realize that you can buy them at CompUSA, stay with me on the hyperbole thread here).

And re: the comment by Leland about how safe his Mac is. While that is largely true, it isn't probably because the OS is superior. It seems like it's because the hackers want to reach as many computers as possible and therefore aren't piddling around writing viruses for Macs. I have Norton and think anyone with a computer in this day and age should have it. No one is safe, don't kid youself.

I guess I'll reveal my age by saying that the first computer I used was a IBM with a magnetic drum memory that you had to optimize by writing code so that the bytes you wanted to access came by the read/write heads just when you wanted them. Thank goodness Fortran came in a year or two later.

Since then I have programmed everything from 6502's to Linux systems. While IBM even donated a dozen of the first PC's to my lab, I didn't have a "home" computer since my wife refused to have anything to do with DOS commands. When she saw one of the original Macs, it was an epiphany, and we have had 3 others of gradually increasing complexity since. I'm typing this on a Powerbook, but she still uses Finale on her old Quadra.

Starting a Mac vs PC argument is useless, as each side is conviced the others are deluded and hopeless. Just one small point: Ever try de-installing an application on Windows? On a Mac you just drag it into the trash!

Joe Baker wrote:I discovered computers at a time when card punch machines SHOULD have already been boxed off and sent to the museum (c. 1981)

Believe it or not, I worked in an MVS shop between 91-93 that still used a card punch and card reader for a couple of their batch jobs! Since they still had the equipment sitting in their computer room, I guess they never wanted to pay a programmer to recode it.